Ship captains and merchant mariners

An alibi the internet cannot disprove

The sea is the one remaining place where being out of contact for weeks is genuinely normal. That authenticity is what scammers rent when they steal a mariner's photographs. Long silences are not suspicious; they are expected, and they let one operator manage many targets at once.

The money moment

Maritime cons cluster around the end of a contract. A payoff is coming — accumulated salary, a retirement package, a bonus — and something small blocks it: an agent's fee, a port fine, a medical bill after an accident on deck. The request always protects a larger imaginary sum, the classic structure of advance-fee fraud.

Seafarers pay twice

Mariners whose photos are stolen often discover it months later, in port, with dozens of messages waiting. Their employers sometimes appear by name in the fake profiles, forcing companies to publish warnings about staff whose images are being abused.

If these photos are yours

You are the second victim of this scam. The money goes to strangers, but the face, the name and the reputation are yours — and the angry messages from defrauded people land in your inbox, not the scammer's.

• Save everything: profile URLs, screenshots with visible usernames, message threads, and the dates you found them.
• Report the fake profile on the platform itself under impersonation, not spam. Impersonation reports are actioned faster and you can usually attach a photo ID.
• File a report with your national fraud body (IC3 in the US, Action Fraud in the UK, the Canadian Anti-Fraud Centre, or your local police cyber unit).
• Submit the scammer's contact details — the email, phone, wallet or profile handle, never your own — to our database so the next person who searches that identifier finds a warning instead of a fake romance.
• If someone contacts you believing they were talking to you, be kind and clear: send them to a search page so they can verify the details for themselves.

If you were talking to one of these profiles

Slow down before you send anything. Ask for a live video call on a platform the other person did not choose. Ask for a photo holding a handwritten note with today's date and an unusual word you pick. Run the phone number, email, username or wallet address through our database. A genuine person will pass all three in minutes; a stolen-photo persona will produce excuses — bad signal, hospital shift, offshore rig, army firewall, "you don't trust me".

Never send money, gift cards, crypto or copies of your own ID to someone you have not met in person, no matter how complete the story sounds.